At Last, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

“Linux vendor Red Hat today released the first public beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, giving observers a look at what’s to come in the next version of its flagship operating system platform. The new release takes advantage of a long list of new Linux kernel improvements for performance and scalability while also providing new technologies for security, management, and virtualization.”

About The Author

20 Comments

This is great news. Red hat is THE corporate standard for Linux based OSes and it’s awesome to see them nearing another release.

As great as the community has been in driving more bugfixes in the more visible portions of the Linux ecosystem, without corporate sponsors like Red Hat, we wouldn’t have the great multipurpose full featured OS that Linux based systems have become. It takes a business like Red Hat to do the non-glamorous coding work that needs to be done to ensure a stable and viable system that corporate environments require.

For that and for sponsoring the Fedora project (running Fedora 13 Beta) I salute them.

I don’t think it will. This is a public beta. Companies will be using it as reference platform for software development. There will be bug fixes and minor updates, but there are never big changes after a beta is released.

There’s nothing really sexy or exciting about a mature company releasing their scheduled mature product when they have a bleeding edge product that better captures the internet of most of this audience.

As someone who used to use Fedora, switching to RHEL was a bit of a downgrade. As we moved past FC6 to F12 & 13, only more so. (Can anyone confirm that we finally get modern Firefox? One with positive integer after 3.? How about a new-ish gnuplot or LaTeX?)

I do have to say, though, that I am impressed that Red Hat managed to out-slow Debian. In the old days, I always used to joke about the long release cycle of Debian stable, but now it’s positively bleeding edge compared to Red Hat.

Yes, yes. I do understand the need for an LTS stable version for enterprise use. I just wish they’d upgrade the usability bits more often. New Firefox, new Thunderbird, new utilities rather than hunting for EPEL versions with odd names (gnuplot42, say, so it doesn’t conflict) or building yourself.

Its not a a good idea, but not for that reason. IF any insane person designed an intranet app for firefox specifically and not just for web standards, my hat is off to them for shooting themselves in the foot with a thermonuclear warhead and surviving.

For the non criminally insane, there are a lot of dependencies in linux distros. upgrading one part may cause a chain reaction of necessary updates. So including one newer version of an app, isn’t that easy. What you find more typically with redhat, is that they will take features from newer versions and back port them to older versions in such a way that it doesn’t require any new dependencies.